Page:Works of Charles Dickens, ed. Lang - Volume 18.djvu/13

Rh The Battle of Life was a series of chambers impossible to get to rights or get out of." Mr. James Payn remarks that he never knew a novelist who dreamed of his characters; but Dickens appeal's to have been an exception to a rule which, if really general, is a curious fact in psychology. Some novelists, like Mr. Stevenson, have owed their characters to their dreams. Criticism must remember the physical condition of the author, overworked and not in a congenial environment, when it estimates both Dombey and The Battle of Life. The excessively complex solution of the sisters' problem does not secure our belief, and could only be made plausible by devoting to their characters, and to that of the useful aunt, the space bestowed on the unessential humours of Dr. Jeddler, and of Messrs. Snitchey and Craggs and their wives. Clemency is a repetition of the Peggotty motive, and, in vulgar modem phrase, the story might by some be called a not very successful "pot-boiler." To discuss that opinion would be to plunge deep in the ethics of literary production. Dickens, we may say, was not consumed by a desire to tell the story of the self-sacrificing sisters. None of the characters had acquired possession of his genius, and haunted him till he gave them literary existence. The remote date, in the last century, was chosen merely for the costume, and there is not a shadow of an effort to reproduce the tone and manners of 1740, or whatever the date may be. The book was written merely because Dickens wanted to make more money. So far it was a genuine "pot-boiler." Yet he threw himself into it with a will. "I know that by what it cost me," he says; and he asked Mr. Forster to keep an eye on his involuntary blank verse "I cannot help it when I am very much in earnest."

It has been already remarked that Dickens's unconscious